Reflecting on Heritage in Ontario
The clock on Ontario’s heritage is ticking ever-closer to January 1, 2025. This is the date set by the Province of Ontario to remove some 36,000 heritage properties listed on Municipal Heritage Registers in communities across the province if they have not been formally designated under the Ontario Heritage Act.
It’s a startling move buried amongst the sweeping changes implemented by Ontario’s Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, the omnibus housing legislation passed in the Fall of 2022. The amendments made to the Ontario Heritage Act under Bill 23 has only exacerbated the issues facing our province’s heritage sector.
In Niagara, it’s no different: our heritage is at risk. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, it has been for a while - long before the passing of Bill 23. Lately, the TBH team has been reflecting on the state of heritage in Niagara. We’ve been asking questions and bringing the heritage practitioners we work with into conversation. How do we best protect, preserve, and promote our collective heritage in a meaningful way while still addressing the broader needs of our communities? How can we ensure the past holds a relevant place in a community’s present and future? What tools are required to do this work effectively
It’s now time that we cast our net even further, and bring you, dear reader, into the dialogue. Read on for some reflections of the issues facing Ontario's heritage sector and the subsequent impacts of Bill 23, and suggestions of how to better situate heritage as part of the solution to the multi-faceted challenges facing our communities.
In the Aftermath of Bill 23
This has been the impact of Bill 23 so far, in our experience.
To address the housing crisis during the Second World War, the Government of Canada endeavoured to build thousands of homes through the Wartime Housing program. City of Toronto Archives.
As part of the Ontario government’s Housing Supply Action Plan, the More Homes Built Faster Act is a combined piece of housing legislation meant to streamline several laws to enable the building of 1.5 million homes over the next 10 year period.
The necessity of drastic change when it comes to the housing crisis is not lost on us here at The Brown Homestead. The majority of our staff is made up of young professionals in our 20s and 30s. We feel this crisis acutely as millennials simply trying to exist *~in this economy~*. But as heritage practitioners, Bill 23’s amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act do more harm than good.
The most dramatic impact of Bill 23 on the heritage sector are the changes to the Municipal Heritage Register. The Register was initially created as a heritage inventory tool for municipalities to keep track of the properties of heritage value in the communities, as well as to offer baseline protections outside of full designation by way of limited, short-term (60 day) demolition controls. This tool was particularly useful for small and rural municipalities with too few resources to undergo the designation process for the heritage properties in their communities.
However, Bill 23 fundamentally changed the very identity of the Municipal Heritage Register. Now, there is a two-year time limit on those properties included in these municipal inventories. After the limit is up, if the property is not designated, it is removed from the Register and not to be added to the inventory again for five years, negating the purpose of the inventory in the first place. According to the Ministry of Citizenship and Multiculturalism, this amendment impacts some 36,000 listed heritage properties in over 100 municipalities across Ontario.
This means that 36,000 structures of heritage value are at risk of demolition - and their history, stories, and community meaning risk being lost as well. These are the buildings that contribute to a community’s character, and sense of identity and place for the people that live there. These are also the buildings that contribute to people wanting to visit these communities - to spend time in an area, and spend money at shops and restaurants. We lose so much more than an old thing when we lose a heritage building.
Reaction in these municipalities has been swift, yet scrambled. Already chronically under-resourced, heritage planners and professionals from across the field have had to quickly pivot their approach to their work. And the two year time-limit placed upon the Register has forced most in the field to react to these changes in a desperate attempt to protect what they can. The urgency has left little time to reflect on whether the old tools we’ve now lost were actually the most effective in the first place.
Responses from across Ontario’s heritage community suggest that we are not alone in disagreeing with the changes to the Municipal Heritage Register. In February 2024, The Architectural Conservancy of Ontario (ACO) released a Letter to Premier Ford on Listed Heritage Properties, requesting an extension of the deadline to designate listed properties from January 1, 2025 to January 1, 2030. The Letter has been endorsed by Municipal Councils across the province, including here in St. Catharines earlier in March. According to the ACO’s Letter, “automatically removing listed properties from the Registry… will encourage demolition of existing and affordable housing alternatives at a time when we need them the most” and that “property owners should not be forced to choose between designation and nothing at all to recognize the heritage significance of their property.” Time is of the essence for municipalities struggling to balance meeting their community’s housing needs and protecting their collective heritage, and our hands instinctively reach towards the old tools we are used to in order to get the job done.
Under the current pressures, most of our energies have been focused on keeping our heads above the paperwork piling before us as we race towards this 2025 deadline. The idea to look beyond this, and towards the future of heritage seems like an incredulous task. Yet, the perspective of our work, that these amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act occurred at all only further demands the necessity for introspection and reflection. Was the Municipal Heritage Register our best tool in the first place? What tools will ensure the past plays an active role in the communities we hope to shape for the future?
Rethinking the Tools We Need
MPP Sam Oosterhoff, TBH Executive Director Andrew Humenuik and Ontario Minister of Citizenship and Multiculturalism Michael Ford in front of The John Brown House. December 2023.
In December 2023, Ontario Minister of Citizenship and Multiculturalism Michael Ford and MPP Sam Oosterhoff visited The Brown Homestead as part of a larger tour of historic sites in Niagara. We shared a lively conversation about the role heritage designation plays in the preservation of community history, culture, and meaning, and we deeply appreciated their time and perspective.
The conversation got us thinking more critically about the tools available to the heritage community to properly preserve, protect, and promote our heritage in our current context. Beyond our organization's active involvement in Niagara's heritage community, working with heritage trades professionals and the Willowbank School of Restoration Arts in our ongoing restoration projects, a few of our team members also sit also on municipal heritage committees and are a part of local historical societies. Along with inviting a few heritage practitioner colleagues into conversation, we’ve joined perspectives to discuss not only the impacts of Bill 23, but the major challenges facing heritage and the work we do. We’ve begun to ask questions to one another, research best practices, explore case studies, and consider a hopeful future where heritage can effectively work in tandem with community development, growth, and improvement.
Situating Heritage as Part of the Solution
There is no denying the housing crisis currently facing Ontario, nor the affordability crisis or the ever-pressing consequences of the climate crisis. The careful teetering to balance growth and development with affordability and sustainability all while also protecting heritage and deepening community connection is changing drastically. In fact, change is inevitable, and required, in order to better our situation.
Yet, for so long, change and heritage have notoriously been placed on opposite sides of the spectrum. So much so that heritage is hardly top of mind for folks committed to bettering communities, and especially for those working to solve the housing crisis. There is this assumption that we need to be willing to lose tangible testaments to our collective memories and identities in order to achieve affordable housing. But this is a false dichotomy. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Our field needs to do a better job at situating the critical importance heritage plays to a community’s sense of place and belonging. The threads of local history are what weave into community identity, culture, and pride. It’s part of who we are. This matters — as does building houses and infrastructure and livable communities.
We’re not here to change people’s minds about where heritage issues stand in the pyramid of a community's needs, but rather to facilitate and broaden the exchange of ideas of how to better situate heritage as an invaluable aspect of progressive, meaningful community building across the pyramid.
As a historic site, The Brown Homestead has a responsibility to consider where heritage is going and what it can be and mean to our community. And we must look beyond our own site to do this work. All in the heritage field have this responsibility. We understand that our sector is also acutely under-resourced and already stretched too-thin. But, if we don’t look up, out, and towards the future, we risk sinking further, and drowning under the weight of it all. It’s simply not sustainable.
So, our question is: how can we better position heritage as an instrument for guiding change, growth and development? Or, perhaps, with a bit more aspirational twist: how can heritage be a part of the solution to the multi-faceted issues facing our communities?
To start the conversation, we’ve identified a few areas where the heritage sector could begin to develop solutions:
Investing in Educating the Public
Public understanding of the Ontario Heritage Act is generally poor, and as a consequence, there are quite a number of pervasive misconceptions about what the Act really does and what heritage designation really means. These myths include:
Heritage designation causes higher insurance costs and adds a further burden of maintenance costs to property-owners
Heritage designation impacts property value
Heritage designation removes property-owner rights and empowers municipalities to control both interior and exterior alterations to a building
Heritage designation is an obstacle to redevelopment and is anti-change
We dispel these myths and explore heritage designation in more detail on Season 3, Episode 6 The Open Door Podcast.
To share this vision of what heritage can be, education is critical. Those who work with the Ontario Heritage Act have a responsibility to teach the public about its purpose and protections, as well as the values that shape it. If we extend our effort to address the misconceptions around heritage, then perhaps we won’t have to work as hard to convince folks of the value heritage holds in a community’s shared identity and culture, sense of place and belonging
2. Re-Evaluating Heritage Tools
After its successful adaptive restoration, the old Welland Avenue United Church has been given a second life as the home of Community Living St. Catharines.
The protection tools currently offered by the Ontario Heritage Act tend to reflect a traditional approach to heritage, and as a consequence, overlook progressive preservation priorities that better reflect contemporary community needs. Here, we ask whether designation should in fact be the end goal for all heritage properties - or can we go further? Can we develop a more dynamic, multi-faceted toolbox, like implementing tools that incentivize heritage protections or encourage purpose-driven adaptive reuse projects that focus on public interest? Stronger adaptive-reuse policies can address aspects of the housing crisis, climate crisis, as well as bolster community revitalization efforts. As one St. Catharines example, the old Welland Avenue United Church was rehabilitated to now serve as the headquarters for Community Living St. Catharines, a charity supporting people with intellectual disabilities.
We also pose whether the Municipal Heritage Register can be remodelled and strengthened to balance meeting the needs of both the heritage community and the planning and development priorities. Or, is there an alternative tool that can be developed in addition to the Register to meet these needs?
3. Fostering Community-Led Engagement
Communities that undertake grassroots heritage preservation efforts lack tools and support, especially in underrepresented communities that have not been included in traditional preservation practice. What kinds of programs, initiatives and incentives can be developed to foster progressive, community-led heritage initiatives that encourage inclusive participation, grassroots agency, and neighbourhood improvement? Empowering communities to take ownership of their collective heritage may also help to alleviate the burden placed on the heritage sector, and facilitate better dialogue and reciprocity.
What Now?
We’re not sure what the solutions are at this point, but we are certain these questions should be brought into the wider conversation. There are also many more issues to consider, and questions to raise. The idea for even sharing this reflection on The Homestead Journal was to expand the dialogue, and to hear your thoughts. Share with us. Challenge us. Encourage us to explore new perspectives and alternatives. We want to hear it in the comments section.
Thinking through and articulating these issues is critical to our work in the heritage field. While it may seem like dreaming for most, our approach to preserving the past must be forward thinking into the future in order to maintain our relevance. Heritage is a tool for bettering communities. And with the crises our province is currently facing, it’s time we shout it from the rooftops.
Author Bio
Sara Nixon (M.A. Public History, Carleton University), is the Community Engagement Manager at The Brown Homestead. Sara has long been dedicated sharing Niagara’s rich history, and is actively involved in the local heritage community. She currently sits as Chair of the Grimsby Heritage Advisory Committee.